Cultural and Artistic Plurality in America

"I like to be in America," from Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story is a picture perfect synthesis of cultural and artistic plurality in America.  The composition style used in the film score for this song is reminiscent of both the Spanish Pasadoble and American Jazz.  Syncopation is the rule rather than the exception with it's compound meter wavering back and forth between a solid two and three beat rhythm.  Bernstein has fused the styles together in a very modern way that seems to communicate the tension of the racial conflicts and cultural identity crisis experienced in America at the time.  People just didn't know where they fit in and some people weren't sure these foreigners should fit at all into the American panorama.

The dancing accompanying this number fits into the time period when dance in Hollywood was still an experimental element of film.  While the overall dancing is quite well pulled off, it's certainly not something you would see in a music video today. The precision between dancers is rough and individualized, however revolutionary for the realm of musical film in the 50's.  Highly suggestive of classical dance technique this choreography blends flamingo/Pasadoble dancing with pirouettes and leaps accompanied by sharp hands and heels.

Humanistically West Side Story is a masterpiece interpreting in a variety of ways the confusion and racial tension of the 50's.  It is the definition of syncretism because it melds several different cultural artistic styles together that revolutionized score composition and theatrical dancing on Broadway.  However, it was not the last drama to be packed with heavy handed social and political statements regarding tolerance and immigration.